God's Word for Kansas City and Beyond

Demographic Information

The following data is demographic Information regarding the 2018 State of the Bible Survey for Kansas City.

The State of the Bible Survey was administered to over 1300 individuals residing in or near the Kansas City area. The participants in the survey most commonly identified as white and female. By age, the greatest number of them were between ages 34 and 52 years, generally categorized as Gen Xers. The average age of the sample is M = 45, SD = 17.0. Tables 1-4 present the distribution of respondents on these variables.

The purpose of the survey was to identify the relationship of participants to Bible Engagement, the church, and their openness to increased Bible Engagement through biblical curiosity and their personal spiritual assessment. To further understand the respondents in this community, a variety of questions were asked regarding education, political identity, faith identity, and attitudes toward Bible readers and the church.

This report contains key findings related to data from respondents in the Kansas City area.

Overview of Demographics of the Respondents Used for Analysis

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In order to ensure that findings from this survey mirror the distribution of residents in the Kansas City area, the sample responses were statistically weighted to correspond to a known distribution of residents for age, gender, and ethnicity. In doing this, the sample used for analysis consisted of n = 1258 people. The distribution of respondents for the weighted sample are presented in tables 5–8.

Table 5

Distribution of Respondents by Ethnicity for Analysis

Table 6

Distribution of Respondents by Gender for Analysis

Table 7

Distribution of Respondents by Generation for Analysis

Table 8

Distribution of Respondents by Education for Analysis

Scripture Engagement​

One of the important issues addressed in this survey was Scripture Engagement. The assessment of Scripture Engagement was based upon responses to a combination of items that were found to form a scale of engagement with respondents classified in one of six groups ranging between Disengaged Non-Bible Users to Bible Centered. In Kansas City, 30% of the respondents are in the Bible Engaged or Bible Centered groups. The group with the preponderance of responses is at the lowest scoring end of the scale were classified as Disengaged Non-Bible Users (47.5%). This distribution is found in Table 9.

Table 9

Distribution of Respondents by Scripture Engagement Segments

Closely related to Scripture Engagement is a respondents’ use of the Bible. When asked how often they use the Bible on their own, 42.4% indicated they use the Bible at least once a week. The distribution of responses for this item is listed in Table 10.